For the past few seasons, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have hosted an emerging designer on the last day of the Milan shows. They lend their atelier and leftover materials and provide a show space. The young talents get a global platform, and the audience, in turn, gets to see new ways of thinking.
Karoline Vitto, the London-based up-and-comer they chose this season, has a lot to teach the fashion establishment. She’s part of an emerging class of women designers that includes Ester Manas in Paris and Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour in New York who reject the narrow perspectives that still shape so many other runways, leaving them woefully one-dimensional. Led by Ashley Graham, Vitto’s cast was proof positive that beauty comes in many sizes besides 00. While prepping for the show backstage, Vitto said, “I’m really hoping this helps the industry maybe reconsider how they’ve been working. We have this amazing cast of curve models. For me, this is major, and I just really hope that other brands can start considering some of these girls as well.”
A graduate of the Royal College of Art and an alum of London’s Fashion East platform, Vitto has another thing going for her: a distinct design vocabulary. The looped metal links that knit together hip-spanning cutouts or curve around the breasts and attach to supportive bra straps make her body-conscious pieces recognizable across the room. Having used deadstock in her previous collections, she was comfortable using Dolce & Gabbana’s castoffs. The charms suspended from the ladder cutouts on a stretchy LBD were from the Italian designers’ trimmings supply. Riffing on the motif of cutouts, she also worked with machine knits, programming the patterns so that the opaque and sheer elements highlighted their wearer’s curves.
Domenico Dolce approved. “Katie Grand introduced Karoline to us and we loved her sensibility. It’s so sensual, so sexy; she has such a clear vision. It’s a new point of view about the fashion world.”